Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I can only say we're talking about a very unprecedented and completely different approach from what I've ever seen in the 10 years I've been here. Mr. Lukiwski can certainly throw any insult he wants. That's fine. I like him, and I think he's often right, but often wrong, but the personal attacks that we see from Conservatives don't change the fact that this is a complete shift away from the due process we are aware of.
We had a committee meeting set up for last week. It was cancelled. We had a committee meeting today that was replaced by the Standing Order 106(4). I hear the Conservatives saying that they're going to just demand a meeting any time they want, even though we have a scheduled meeting for Thursday, which is a two-hour period that is there.
That takes me back to my point that at every single point we've seen the Conservatives simply say, “Hey, we're going to throw the rules and the ruling out the window. We're going to proceed because we have that parliamentary majority”, which the former Law Clerk warned us about. The question I ask you again is this: Is the official opposition going to be allowed to ask our questions, because systematically in Conservative committees, Conservative chairs rule opposition questions out of order.
We have seen this systematically right across our committees. We have seen chairs say, “No, the study is only on the benefits of this Conservative policy. You can't ask a question about any of the problems or consequences that come out of that Conservative policy”.
We have seen that systematically. It's a huge abuse of the parliamentary process. It basically eliminates democratic debate.
I ask you again, Mr. Chair, because I'd like you to be on the record: are you going to rule opposition members' questions out of order, or are you going to allow us to ask the questions around the Speaker's ruling, around the issues that we've seen, of course, with the Board of Internal Economy and its partisan nature and the issue around the warnings that the deputy law clerk provided to us around this study itself, which said that the motion of instruction was the only thing that validated it and the motion of instruction has been ruled inadmissible.
We saw that in the Speaker's ruling. That is the ruling. Despite what Mr. Lukiwski says, the Conservatives lost that ruling. The Government House Leader was not happy when the ruling came down, but we got the ruling, and the reality is that is a ruling that members should be heeding.
Then, of course, there is the other issue, which is the systematic and planned ongoing partial leaks—not of everything. The documents that reinforced our position sometimes were withheld but systematic and partial leaks took place regularly following the warnings from the deputy law clerk that these leaks should not be taking place and that the committee should put in place every single measure to ensure that those leaks did not take place.
Those are the kinds of questions that I certainly will want to ask. My colleagues probably have other questions they want to ask the deputy law clerk. Will those questions be allowed? That is my question to you, Mr. Chair.